About-To-Be-Misallocated Maine Election Is A Warning for Massachusetts

Two-term U.S. Representative Bruce Poliquin, the only Republican member of Congress in New England, got about 2,000 more votes than his nearest competitor, a Democrat, on election day last week.

So he won re-election, right?

Actually, probably not.

Maine two years ago adopted a ranked-choice voting system that asks voters to pick not only the candidate they want to win, but also their second choice. (And third choice, and fourth choice …)

It’s used as a sort of tie-breaker, if no candidate gets an outright majority of votes cast. Except that it’s not really a tie-breaker, since the top two candidates aren’t tied – one of them got more votes than the other, but could still lose. So really, it’s an election flipper.